When Eyes Can Replace Ears

Ive been reading lately, here and on other music related forums, about people starting having problems with their hearing.
How can you deal with that when your biggest passion s music, mixing and producing ?
Well, as an imperfect solution come analyzers.

This is, of course, an imperfect solution but came in handy also for people without disabilities but just with a fatigued hearing (after hours of mixing) or just a double check.
Some sound editors have that useful tool but most of sequencers/ multitrackers need a third party plugin.
Here’s a list of some good free analyzers:

Sonogram sg-1
SG-1 gathers some features which are usually isolated in other sonogram tools.
It works in real-time. It continues analyzing in the background, and only stops when you freeze it. Both in frozen or running mode, every time you click or drag within the sonogram area, frequency and amplitude rulers highlight the values corresponding to that point.
A little LED -like screen shows you in detail analysis information and parameter modifications, or the transport position when idle.
Available as Win VST .

Last on this list I left my favorite one.MultiInspectorFree
MultiInspectorFree is a 31 band spectral analyzer with multitrack functionality. It incorporates a standard third octave frequency analyzer. Center frequencies of the bands are based on the ISO 266 :1997 standard (20 Hz to 20 kHz). Pink noise will appear flat in the frequency spectrum. MultiInspectorFree supports up to 4 instances at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz.
MultiInspectorFree visualizes up to 4 different audio signals in real time in one window .
Available as Win VST , Mac VST and Mac AU.

Those are “the really good ones”. My personal favorites are “Seven Phases Spectrum Analyzer” and “MultiInspectorFree” but there are more free analyzers “out there”.
Blue Cat’s FreqAnalyst (this react too slow for me), s(M)exoscope by Bram from Smartelectronix (somehow weird showing and also slow reacting), DtBlkFx by Darrell Barrell and FREE Oscilloscope which I didn’t tried yet.
FL users have “Eye Candy” and the oscilloscope which I never got hang of

I agree, for music there is nothing that can replace a good ear, but there are situations when you need some more help, you need to have more feedback from what you’re doing or your ears are too tired and you stopped hearing.

Anyway, just found something interesting. Didn’t tried it yet but I’m on it…

Oszillos Mega Scope
Oszillos-Mega-Scope is a BPM -synced oscilloscope with support for multiple inputs. It gives you a visualisation of the waveforms you feed it. This can be handy in different situations like compressor-fine-tuning, sound design, drum programming, etc.
Features:
- Supports multiple Channels.
- Supports different zoom-levels (1/32th note to 16 bars).
- Two different visualisation modes (separate waves, combined waves).

The interesting thing that caught my eye is the support for multiple inputs, so you can monitor more ellements of your mix and how they “sit in the mix” together.

That article reminded me of the movie “It’s All Gone Pete Tong” and a discussion on KVR forum with one guitarist/ producer who almost lost his hearing.
In fact I was thinking of him when I started this thread, but lately more and more musicians complains about loosing their hearing.